Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia by Kathlene Baldanza (review)

In recent decades, scholars have debated about relations between the polities and peoples of East Asia prior to the twentieth century. One deeply ingrained but increasingly challenged approach is tributary relations, a hierarchical system that places China at its geopolitical and civilizational apex and arrays its neighbors in descending order, according to their relative acceptance of Chinese cultural norms, diplomatic protocols, and geopolitical agendas. Advocates of the tributary model suggest that it facilitated peaceful relations between China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, because they all shared Confucian values, including a distinctly non-Westphalian embrace of inequality and hierarchy as a key to order and stability. The rise of nationalism (both political and cultural) and the rise of Chinese power have frequently intensified academic debates.

Deftly using both Chinese and Vietnamese primary sources and secondary scholarship, Baldanza instead argues that Sino–Viet relations from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries are best understood as a process of contestation, negotiation, and compromise rather than the result of clear, widely accepted borders and statuses. She draws imaginatively from the poetry, letters, and the lives of Chinese and Vietnamese men, usually officials and scholars, to explore illustrative moments when competing claims were aired, debated, and resolved, at least temporarily. Rather than search for mutually exclusive or monolith Chinese and Vietnamese identities or objectives, Baldanza offers nuanced readings of edicts, policy papers, poems, novels, and illustrations to reveal the ambitions and anxieties, self-perceptions, and strivings of individuals. Sliding easily between history and literature, such sources yield their full significance only to those with sure knowledge of both Chinese and Vietnamese contexts. On a wide range of issues—to go to war or to engage in diplomatic negotiation, to recognize a ruler or to back an “insurgent” leader, to highlight cultural commonality or to insist on unbridgeable difference—Baldanza shows that fierce debate blazed not only across the border (that is, Chinese versus Vietnamese) but on either side of the border, that is, among compatriots.

A central question running throughout the book is the relationship of the past to present. The identity of educated men in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam derived in part from their deep familiarity with the written classical tradition that first originated in China. Although they all spoke different languages, they read the same texts in the original language and claimed to embody the highest classical standards of personal morality, literary grace, and cultural accomplishment. Not only did individuals make such claims; so did states. Baldanza proposes that Vietnamese use of the classical tradition in general and certain claims in particular (calling its ruler emperor rather than king, declaring possession of the Mandate of Heaven, etc.) threatened China’s “very ideological coherence” (6). However, it is more accurate to distinguish the two outlooks, Vietnam’s being primarily a cultural claim and China’s a political one. Such tensions will be familiar to students of Parhae/Bohai, Khitan, Jurchen, Korean, and Japanese history. Baldanza sheds welcome light on how this fascinating dimension of diplomatic, intellectual, and cultural history unfolded between China and Vietnam.